It has been reported by PHK over at Expreview forums that AMD would be launching their upcoming Radeon HD 7990 “Malta” GPU on 22nd April 2013. AMD has been preparing their reference Radeon HD 7990 card since a while and was only showcased recently at GDC 2013 (Games Developer Conference).

AMD Possibly Launching Radeon HD 7990 Malta on 22nd April

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 reference dual-chip beast, previously known as New Zealand is codenamed Malta. It was showcased at GDC 2013 which revealed that it still carried the triple fan cooling solution shown over a year ago. It was also mentioned that the Radeon HD 7990 powered the 17 minute gameplay trailer of Battlefield 4 which is being developed by DICE. A few days ago, a reddit user who was later revealed to be a developer on the Frostbite 3 engine posted a picture of his test setup that was running the Radeon HD 7990 in CrossFireX mode.

AMD has been quiet till now and haven’t released any concrete information on the specifications. The Radeon HD 7990 is supposedly carrying dual Tahiti cores however the could be new cores based on the GCN 2.0 architecture too. Its a possibility since last month, AMD released their Radeon HD 7790 GPU which carried the Bonaire XT GPU. The Bonaire XT GPU itself falls as a GCN 2.0 part which would fully be unleashed in Q4 2013 with the arrival of HD 8000 series discrete GPUs. Another thing to note is that, while the custom AIBs built HD 7990 GPUs require three 8 Pin connectors, the AMD reference “Malta” design only requires two 8 Pin connectors which points at a power draw of 375W. At the same time, the Radeon HD 7990 GPU is rumored to be faster than the custom built boards from their AIB partners. One thing is for sure that given the time AMD has spend developing there reference solution, their might be some super secret tech their hiding from us, one which would only be made clear on launch.